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Brought to heel

Given current fashion's infatuation with freaky footwear, &quot;On A Pedestal: From Renaissance Chopines to Baroque Heels,&quot; an exhibition that opened at the Bata Shoe Museum last week and runs until Sept. 20, 2010, couldn't be more apropos.

The architecture of this shoe is said to be a merger between a chopine and the up-to-the-minute fashion of high heels. From Skokloster Castle, Stockholm. (GORAN SCHMIDT PHOTO)

By David LivingstoneSpecial to the Star

Thu., Nov. 26, 2009

Given current fashion's infatuation with freaky footwear, "On A Pedestal: From Renaissance Chopines to Baroque Heels," an exhibition that opened at the Bata Shoe Museum last week and runs until Sept. 20, 2010, couldn't be more apropos.

A powerhouse show featuring rarities from around the world, it focuses on a couple of the most extreme styles ever to have shod fashionable extremities: the chopine, a kind of platform mule that, around from antiquity, peaked in 16th- century Italy, and the high heel, which by the 17th-century became the preferred mode in elevation.

When it comes to platforms and heels, the runways of the world have lately offered up some real doozies.

Sure, they say kitten heels and clogs are coming back, but the most talked-about shoes of the spring collections were the claw-shaped numbers with 25-centimetre heels worn at Alexander McQueen and sported by Lady Gaga in her "Bad Romance" video.

For outrageousness, however, the past trumps the present. Surely her Ladyship would die to get her hands on the 17th-century chopines, more than 50 centimetres in height, that the Bata has on loan from a museum in Venice and that are making its first and last appearance outside that city.

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In Renaissance Italy, these contraptions, made of white kid leather over wood and looking like skeletal limbs, were not meant to be visible. Out of sight under long skirts, they were a means to lengthen a figure to allow more room for the display of sumptuous cloth. Nevertheless, chopines could be very pretty, as evidenced in a pair of velvet beauties daintily decorated with lace and tassels.

With an exhibition of such particular focus, a sense of seen one, seen 'em all might set in. But there's no chance of that here. The design of the exhibition, which includes arched colonnades, is dramatic, and Bata curator Elizabeth Semmelhack has worked hard to come up with pictorial material that supplements the artifacts in their cases.

There's the "postcard" from 17th-century Venice that depicts an ostentatious courtesan with a skirt that flips up to reveal her undies and chopines. The raised wooden shoes inlaid with mother of pearl, from the Bata collection, look just like those in the reproduction of The Bath, by the 19th-century French Orientalist painter Jean-Léon Gérome.

Likewise, a Persian miniature of a 17th-century warrior provides context and adds impact to the men's heeled shoe of green-dyed horsehide that looks as if it stepped out of the painting.

Other examples of early high heels also come from the male wardrobe. Red-heeled, over-the-knee boots from the 17th century are thought to have been worn by King Karl X Gustav of Sweden.

This season, over-the-knee boots are cropping up everywhere – everywhere, that is, except on men. There was a brief spell back in the 1970s when platforms were popular among men and women, but, according to the "On A Pedestal" catalogue, the spark of high-heeled boys more or less went out in the 1730s. Crazy high footwear has been left to women and remains what Semmelhack describes as "a complex signifier of gender."

How complex was made clear just the other night on the American Music Awards. Wearing flats, Jennifer Lopez took a tumble. But she rocked steady in her lacy shoe-booties, in song proclaiming her independence from a part-time lover by declaring, "I'm throwing on my Louboutins."

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